There may be occasions where you, as the administrator of a machine, may want to see what cron entries your users have.  Maybe you have slow downs at a particular time every day, and want to see who’s running what.

All crontab’s, for all users, are stored in /var/spool/cron/crontabs on Debian and Ubuntu, as plain text files.   So, as root, you will be able to cat any of the files in there – they are stored as the username, so:

/var/spool/cron/crontabs/daz

… would be a user called “daz” for example.

In CentOS, the path is slightly different – there is no crontabs directory, so it’s simply:

/var/spool/cron/

You can also find out an individual users’ crontab by issuing (as root);

crontab -l -u username

This will show you that users crontab.  Of course, if you want to edit it, you can by doing:

crontab -e -u username



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